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“I’m not talking about that; that’s not important. What is important right now is this…this thing you all—”
“Your pregnant wife is not important?” she snapped.
“That is not what I meant,” I muttered, rising from the bed. “What do you know? How much? Why did no one speak to me? Why are you all treating me as if I am a child? Do you not understand what you all have done?”
“I am praying to God this anger rising in you right now was not directed at Odette!”
“Forget Odette right now—”
“I will not!” she snapped, rising out of her chair. “That girl has damn well saved this family more times than I can count, and you yell at her for your mistake and your grandmother’s mistake?”
“My mistake? How in the hell—”
“For years, I have warned you. We all warned you. Stay away from women like Sabina! You refused. You thought you knew better! You thought that just because they never asked you for anything upfront and pretended not to care or get attached, that it was all just fun. You ignored us! And when it came time to pay the consequences of that, the whole monarchy had to bear it, even your wife!”
“That is not an excuse to have—” I bit my lip to keep from saying it aloud. “You don’t think I know that my past behavior has caused my present issues? I’m keenly aware. That said, I am stepping up to fix what I can. And instead of getting support, I get…” Criminal activity! “Did I look that incompetent that we had to go this far? I don’t even know where to begin with this, Mother! What am I to do? What am I supposed to say? Half the country already thinks the worst of me. And now this? Now I have to decide this? Part of me is grateful Father is sleeping because if he knew this…Grandmother would be—”
“It’s clear Odette didn’t tell you everything, and it only makes me feel more indebted to her.” She huffed and sat back down.
“What does that mean?”
She didn’t answer me; instead, she looked at my father, her hands over her mouth as if she were trying to hold the words back down.
“Mother!” I called again, feeling like I was experiencing déjà vu. First, Odette went silent on me, and now her? “What are these secrets you all have? Why—”
“Galahad, do you want to know the truth? Or do you want to forever hold your father as a great hero in your mind?” she asked, looking at me. “You can’t do both. I knew she would realize that the moment she ran to tell you that night. Sometimes the truth is too heavy for a king to bear, and so the queen does it for him. I failed to do that with your father, and it gutted him.”
“Mother, what are you saying?”
“You and your father are a lot alike,” she whispered.
And suddenly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the truth anymore. But she told it to me anyway, and I found myself speechless. She spared nothing from the truth of my father’s affair to my grandmother’s actions to cover it up. She didn’t stop there, either; she went on and on, telling me everything she’d done, every scandal they had covered up, every lie they had told. I didn’t know when I sat down how I had gotten to be sitting in a chair beside my father, sitting opposite of her, as if this were his death-bed confessional. And with each other, the childish gaze that was over my entire life seemed to vanish. Things I didn’t understand, or I brushed off as a child were now connected in ways I didn’t even realize.
Why my grandmother rarely ever came to see us, and why she was so wary of me listening to her, why my father rarely spoke about his father. Why he pushed so hard to be close to me. Comments my father made in passing toward me…all of it made sense.
When she was done, all I could do was look at my father—the king I always strived to be, the man I always thought only made one mistake…which ended bringing me the best thing in the world.
“You’re wrong,” I whispered to her. “I can know it all and still think of him as a hero, Mother. Just like you can know everything and still be here, beside him till the end.”
“Love lets us see what we want to see. Your father wasn’t perfect, Gale. None of us are. We mess up, and sometimes we mess up badly. But we have to—”
“Press on?” I interrupted her. “At what cost? Those are real people we are crushing, people who make mistakes too, who mess up badly too. What makes us better than them? The crown on our heads?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation, and just then, I saw the queen rise, like a phoenix. “You should work to do and be better than us, Gale. But at the end of the day, this family is yours to protect now. There are people who hope for us, believe in us. If you don’t protect the monarchy, if you don’t bear it, those who have been waiting for centuries will finally rip us all apart. Everything your father built, your brother tried to build…it will be hacked to bits and aired on some streaming channel as entertainment. All you can hope for is that at the end of your reign, you have done more good than bad. I know your father has. I cannot speak of your grandmother’s time; the truth of the matter is she has never admitted to anything, nor will she ever. Her secrets will follow her to her grave. And all we have are suspicions…uncertainties that we can never dig deeper into. If we are lucky maybe…maybe just maybe it was all a coincidence.”
I gave her a look. She could not possibly believe that, not after what she had just told me. I wanted to do and be good. I thought I only had to carry my own sins and issues; I forgot that as a king, I was carrying everyone’s. So…what did I do now? She was right. None of us knew for sure what my grandmother had or hadn’t done, because what was the alternative? Investigate? Leave ourselves open for every attack possible?
It was best to be ignorant.
But that also meant…for the sake of the monarchy, I had to surrender. I had to give the prime minister what he wanted.
“There is a consequence for everything, Mother.” I sighed, rising to my feet. “Yours is going to have to be to return to the palace with me.”
“What?” She frowned and shook her head. “Gale, I can’t! I have to stay with your father.”
“He’ll return to the palace, too. I’m going to have to give in to the prime minister’s demands, which means we are about to get a lot of backlash. I won’t be able to come here if anything else happens. So you will have to give up on normal, fix your hair, put on your pearls, and be Queen Mother again.”
“It will look like I’m not giving Odette room to reign. The palace must understand she is the head now—”
